Facts don’t make writing good, and facts don’t make a story true. Mostly, facts provide an excuse for bad writing, and distract us from the truth about our own lives. Media outlets like to hype the factuality of their news reports, as incentive for you to ingest their bland, decontextualized descriptions of the day’s most violent events, but facts, by themselves, mean nothing. Divorced from perspective, facts have no power.

We tend to overemphasize the importance of facts in our culture, in the same way we over-value material objects. In reality, facts don’t lead to the truth any more than buying a Bowflex machine leads to the perfect physique. Nothing prevented you from exercising your muscles before you bought the machine. The machine just offers you a specific way to do something that you obviously prefer to avoid. Similarly, nothing prevented you from thinking deeply about your existential condition before The News started feeding you “the facts you need to understand your world.” Watching the News feels like you are doing something edifying, but really, it takes up way too much space for something we’re just not that involved with.

Journalists meticulously strip perspective out of their stories, leaving nothing but impotent rubbish to take up all of the space between the ads. “Unbiased and impartial” really means “disinterested and uncaring.” That’s how corporate advertisers like it, and that’s how corporate domination becomes the predominant perspective of all media. Advertisers pay for the right to present their perspective in their own words, against a neutral background of disconnected, irrelevant and objectified facts. That’s why “fact based journalism” is so popular in modern media.

For some reason, we believe in this myth about facts. We believe that exposing them and broadcasting them to every corner of the world will somehow make things better. We say: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” but today we see how the worst kind of scum thrives in bright light, so long as nothing taller or stronger can take root. Scum thrives because The News scorches the Earth with irrelevant, disembodied facts.

The News fills your head with irrelevancies that distract, subvert and belittle your own thought process, while it consumes all of the space where you might actually talk to your peers. Watching The News is not how you become an informed citizen; watching The News is how you become a brainwashed drone, and that’s not what anyone really aspires to become.

Information can be inspiring, relevant and powerful, but rarely is it so. Mostly, especially today, information distracts us, saps our energy, and wastes our time. The News becomes addictive, not because it provides an essential nutrient to intellectual and civic life, but because it masks the angst, confusion and general unease of alienation. Facts, as they come from to us from the media, amount to little more than an endless trail of breadcrumbs leading us nowhere except toward obesity, malnutrition and death.

To find the very worst fact-based writing, however, you have to read science. Science, as a whole, amounts to an immense edifice of the worst published writing in the history of human language, which unscrupulous men use in their quest to dominate the Earth. In that way, modern science is very much like the medieval Catholic Church.

Few of us read much real science. Mostly, this indecipherable gobbledygook gets filed away in back rooms of libraries or in ungoogleable internet servers, where no one ever reads it, but it becomes part of this enormous edifice of sacred texts into which all learned people have invested large portions of their lives, with the promise that if they did, they would earn more money than the rest of us.

In reality, nothing in that edifice of so-called knowledge helps us, or them, understand the world we live in. Instead, it amounts to an encyclopedia of violence and a compendium of oppression. The edifice we call “Science” contains the formula for every toxic chemical on Earth. It tells you everything you need to know to build a thermonuclear weapon, and it contains every study ever conducted for the purpose of learning how to influence consumer behavior and effectively brainwash a population. The truth of the matter is that the only thing educated people really learn, in all their years of study, is the dynamics of civilized political power, and by the time they understand that, they’re already too deeply invested in it to quit.

Scientists further deny the basic truth of our lived experience by telling us that the only facts that matter, have to be carefully chosen according to complex statistical algorithms that only scientists understand, or they have to be gathered in a laboratory setting. Scientists will be the first to dismiss the facts of your life as irrelevant, anecdotal and statistically insignificant. They’ll tell you to base your decisions on the proven probabilities of verifiable science, and to calculate, rather than feel your way through life. That’s how scientists tell you that they think they should make your decisions for you, and that’s another way that modern science resembles the Catholic Church.

All of the facts in the world don’t make bad writing worth reading. Facts are just a sleazy tool to sell empty words, and too many empty words can bury you. On the other hand, writing that speaks to you, has truth in it, and you will find the facts that support it because there is more truth in the facts of your life, than you will ever find in all of the news media and science writing on Earth.

I’ve read High Times Magazine off and on for years. That’s where I first encountered our local celebrity grower, Jorge Cervantes. In addition to his features in High Times, Jorge Cervantes has written several very popular books about marijuana cultivation including: Marijuana Horticulture, The Cannabis Encyclopedia, and Marijuana, Guerrilla Growing. He has also produced numerous videos about growing cannabis for growers who can’t read.

I never liked Jorge’s pieces in High Times, and I never bought any of his books. His voice never sang to me, but it was more than that. I have to admit that I didn’t like looks of the guy. I assumed it was my own cultural prejudice, so I cut the guy some slack. After all, I love cannabis, and I like growing it. I figured we would have some common ground, but I never found it.

Growing cannabis from seed was a spiritual experience for me. Cannabis is a righteous herb that deserves her place in the sun. Any power that would enslave, oppress, oppose or eradicate a righteous herb like cannabis has no place on this green Earth. Cannabis changed the way I see the world. Selling cannabis on the black market felt like pimping my sister. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I grow weed because I like weed, and weed likes me. Money has nothing to do with it.

I couldn’t write about growing weed without a lot of that kind of talk. It’s an attitude of respect, and I think that’s what cannabis consciousness is all about. Jorge clearly understood cannabis. He knew what she needed, and gave it all to her, but he never seemed to be able to grow enough. Jorge Cervantes always grew way more weed than any one or two people, or even an extended Rastfarian family could smoke in a year. He specialized in “guerrilla grows” and showed you how to infest every possible out-of-the-way place with an unsightly, dangerous-looking but vibrantly productive cannabis garden. Jorge didn’t seem to care about anything except producing pounds, and the attitude he conveyed in his articles really turned me off.

I thought High Times made a bad move when they started running his articles, especially when they showed his disguised face. Jorge looked like a caricature of a Mexican drug dealer with his trademark Che Guevara beret over cascades of jet-black dreadlocks. Dark Ray-bans and a sinister black goatee completed the image. Jorge Cervantes disguised himself as a racial stereotype that fueled the War on Drugs. That’s why I thought High Times made a mistake when they put Jorge’s picture on the cover and got behind him in a big way.

Still, I thought, “What have I got against a Mexican guy who grows weed?” I didn’t like his “get rich quick scheme” attitude, but I can understand where he might not have had the same opportunities available to me, a white working-class kid from Akron, Oh. I really didn’t like the stereotype image, but I know what it’s like to perpetuate a stereotype. I don’t put a lot of effort into it; being a hippie just comes naturally to me. Even so, I didn’t like his writing style or the layout of his books, even if I could get past the racist stereotype on the cover.

I much preferred to get my cannabis growing advice from Ed Rosenthal, who also authored many popular books on the subject, as well as a regular column in High Times. Ed spoke to me. Ed Rosenthal showed you how to grow cannabis in almost any unused space in your home. He showed you how to grow your own, in your own home, so you could end your dependence on the black market. Ed always advocated for legalization, in his writing, and for real. I met Ed Rosenthal at a couple of legalization rallies, and watched him whip-up a crowd to work for legalization. Ed Rosenthal is an inspiring guy. I never saw Jorge Cervantes at a legalization rally.

Especially now that he feels safe enough to reveal his true identity. Now that the rest of us have done the work necessary to change the law, look who popped out from behind that old racist drug war stereotype. It’s the lily-white George Van Patten, son of the equally white Dr. Cecil R and Ester Van Patten. I imagine they must be very disappointed in their son. I know I certainly am.

Here’s a guy who hid behind a racist stereotype of a Mexican drug dealer, for decades, while he got rich off the War on Drugs that he help perpetuate through his stereotype image. The weed was real. The greed was real, and the sneakiness was real. Only the Mexican was phony.

How many Hispanic men have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement because they look like Jorge Cervantes? How many years did he set back the cause of legalization with that hokey get-up? How can anyone be proud of that?

It’s a problem that a lot of people have around here. They have land, and a home, and plenty of money and stuff, and they know how to grow weed, but they don’t have a lot to be proud of, and, in some cases, kind of a lot to be ashamed of.

By now you should realize that the 5th Sunday of the month means you should turn your radio on first thing in the morning for a stimulating, thought-provoking, in-depth discussion of the issues that define our times. If you are not already hip to The Living Earth Connection, and you have an IQ just slightly higher than the average garden slug, you owe it to yourself to listen to one of the most interesting hours of radio programming you are likely to hear anywhere at any time.

The Living Earth Connection airs on the fifth Sunday of the month, in those occasional months that have five Sundays, at 9:30 AM on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio. That’s THIS Sunday, March 29 at 9:30 AM Pacific Time. My partner, Amy Gustin, hosts the show. She does an enormous amount of research for her show. She usually reads 20 to 25 books in preparation for each show, and this one is no exception.

For this upcoming edition of The Living Earth Connection, Amy examines the dynamic relationship between agricultural development and biodiversity. In 2014, the Living Planet Report cited a 52% decline in global biodiversity since 1970. In a discussion that encompasses biology, ecology, and island bio-geography, Amy reveals that the key to our collapsing ecosystems lies in the habitat requirements of certain “keystone species.”

These “keystone species” tend to be relatively small populations of relatively large carnivores. Although few in number, as individuals, these “keystone species” require an enormous “home range,” and much of the biodiversity in their ecosystem depends, in one way or another, on their presence. Developing land for agriculture punches holes in the habitat that these animals need to survive. When development crowds out the “keystone species,” most of the natural biodiversity in the area disappears as well.

This is a show about natural science. I know you all like science when you get to watch them put a nuclear powered car on Mars, or when you think it means we understand how the universe works.

Are you still interested in science when it tells you that agricultural development is causing mass extinction on a global scale?

On Sunday November 30, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, at 9:30 am on KMUD Redwood Community Radio, you can hear my lovely partner, Amy Gustin interview the world-renowned, author and thinker, Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, My Ishmael, The Story of B, Beyond Civilization and many other books.

Daniel Quinn has a new book, titled: The Teachings That Came Before and After Ishmael.

Quinn realized that, while many people have read Ishmael, most people have missed the material he covers in his other books. In The Teachings… Quinn condenses the ideas from all of his other writing into one book, the perfect companion to his central work: Ishmael.

If you haven’t read Ishmael yet, you absolutely must read this book. Every responsible adult who can read, owes it to themselves, and to the future of Planet Earth, to read Ishmael. Some people look at the title, and get a load of the zealous people telling them to read it, and think that Ishmael must be some kind of weird religious mumbo-jumbo that brain-washes readers into joining a cult.

True, you’ll find some biblical stuff in there, like a pretty good explanation for the story of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and after you read it, you may want to join a cult, but there is nothing religious about Ishmael, and it contains absolutely no mumbo-jumbo. Ishmael is a good book to help you understand exactly what went wrong.

If you want to know what caused the environmental crisis, read Ishmael. If you want to understand overpopulation, read Ishmael. If you want to know why you spend so much time at work, and why it sucks so much, read Ishmael. Ishmael can help you understand where you stand. If you understand where you stand, you can figure out what to do. So, before you do anything else, read Ishmael.

…And pick up Quinn’s newest book, The Teachings That Came Before and After Ishmael to go with it. The Teachings… contains condensed versions of The Story of B and My Ishmael, as well as excerpts from Tales of Adam, Beyond Civilization, The Book of the Damned, Providence, The Invisibility of Success, and If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways. Even if you can’t read, you can listen to Daniel Quinn himself explain his work to you so you can see for yourself why so many people feel so strongly about a short novel about a talking gorilla.

Please tune in on Sunday November 30 at 9:30 am Pacific Time for a very special episode of The Living Earth Connection featuring a new interview with visionary author, Daniel Quinn recorded just this week…I can’t tell you the details of it because the interview hasn’t happened yet, but we expect to talk to him tomorrow. You can hear the show on the radio, if you live within the KMUD listening area, or you can stream the show live, or at anytime thereafter on the KMUD archive at www.kmud.org

You can also stream or download both Living Earth Connection #12 featuring Daniel Quinn talking about his new book as well as Wildlife Matters #3 featuring Mourad Gabriel on fisher ecology and rat poison at Amy Gustin’s blog The Living Earth Connection.

grangerize (grain jer eyes) v to illustrate by inserting engravings or photographs from other books. Also to mutilate books to obtain material for such illustrations. Derived from the English author James Granger, who used this method to illustrate his book: Biographical History of England.

James Granger

How about that! There’s a word to describe the method I use to illustrate this blog.

I guess that makes me a grangerizer. …or maybe I could call myself a Granger Ranger.

Marilyn Monroe once said, to someone looking for a suggestion as to what to get her for her birthday, said something to the effect of “Whatever you do, don’t get me A BOOK. I already have A BOOK.”

Bookish intellectuals scoff at such talk. They’ve read hundreds, if not thousands of books, and spent countless hours browsing the stacks at dozens of libraries. Why?

I doubt Marilyn Monroe ever stepped inside a library, but I’ll bet she knew more about men than most intellectuals, because she spent her life surrounded by them. On the other hand, too many people seek refuge from life in books, living vicariously through the thoughts of others. This is neither healthy nor enlightening.

Still others consider the stack of books they’ve read a hard earned achievement, looking down at the rest of us from a high plateau of bound paper. They didn’t seek refuge from life in books, no they sacrificed their lives to acquire this knowledge, and to scale that plateau. So, they deserve to look down on the rest of us from that high place.

Those folks live on shaky ground, and deep down, they’re nervous about it. All written knowledge begins to crumble almost as soon as its written, but one revolutionary new idea can bring the whole intellectual construct crashing down into a heap of quaint, arcane rubble. Even though it has happened dozens of times in our history, that still doesn’t stop people from wasting their time studying these quaint arcane writings.

That’s because we’re really not that bright as a species. We’re pretty good with our hands. We’re quite persistent, and we can tell a good story, but we really have no more of an idea how the world works than say a baboon or even a chipmunk.

We’d like to believe we know how the world works, and some of those plateau-standers might convince other people that they know more than a chipmunk, but they’re just full of bunk, and the people who believe them are simply more gullible than your average rodent. Lots of creatures know how to bamboozle their own kind, nothing unique there.

Some people even believe that we stand at the verge of a great moment of human evolution. That we are evolving into god-like creatures capable of engineering a better world for all of us. They believe that “civilized” humans will, very shortly, through the accelerating scientific, technological, and communication revolution, achieve world peace, a sustainable way of life, equality and justice for all.

It sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Maybe not as stupid as believing in some “Saviour” who’s supposed to come down from the heavens to rescue us from ourselves, but almost as stupid. If you buy into either of those stories, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

The fact that either of these stories attract so many believers is living proof that, as I said before, we are not that bright, as a species. A little brighter than chimps, sure, but probably not as bright as dolphins, who are at least smart enough to know better than to try to engineer a better ocean. Only fools and lunatics dream of a better world. The rest of us couldn’t possibly imagine such a place.

Unfortunately, the lunatics have been running the show, for quite some time now. So, we all have plenty of craziness to take refuge from, and stacks and stacks of lunacy to lose themselves in. That still doesn’t make it a good idea. Nor does it mean we are getting smarter as a species.

Quite the contrary, I fear. The more time we spend in the grossly oversimplified world of other people’s ideas, the less time we spend in the incomprehensibly rich, real world, from which all true knowledge flows. So, we increasingly inhabit a simplified, engineered world full of artificial constructs that dull, rather than stimulate the mind. After all, if the real world is what you want to know about, the real world is what you should study. The world is its own teacher.

bib li ol lat er (bib lee all eht er) n, one overly devoted to books, one overly devoted to one book such as the bible.

Books can be a vice, especially the bible. Book lovers know this, but they keep it to themselves. You will never find a book about it. You will find books about the evils of alcohol, drugs, sex and gambling, but you’ll never find a book about the evils of books.

If you want to know what terrible things can happen to you if you abuse books, you have to ask a drunk prostitute in a casino.

That is if you don’t trust Marilyn Monroe.

This wise woman hated books!

So, be careful, books can lead you down a dark slippery slope that you will slide right down, till you hit rock-bottom.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)